English equivalent for French "les attendus d'un procès"?

Question

In French the yet archaic term les attendus remains the traditional way to designate the part of text, in the report of a trial, which explains the motivations that led the court to its final decision.

This comes from the fact that this text is generally always made of a series of paragraphs, each one beginning with "Attendu que" (standing for "due to", "because", and so on), followed by the detailed description of a unitary motivation.

I even don't know if English trial reports are built in the same way. Anyway I can't reasonably infer to use something like "the expected": it sounds too strange!

So is there a real English equivalent for les attendus?

Answer 1

There is no such constraint on the form in which judges in the English common-law tradition couch their decisions. Judges are very jealous of their literary freedom. I don't think you could be held in contempt of court for suggesting that there should be a standard form, but I wouldn't risk it.

Solemn (albeit usually inconsequential) legislative and executive proclamations, however, employ the stereotyped formula Whereas [A] ... and Whereas [B] ... and Whereas [C] ... NOW THEREFORE [X], so you will occasionally run across Whereases for pompous legal prose.

ADDED:
And in fact, after a little Google-Booking, I find this discussion of 'The form of a French report' in which the author explicitly refers to attendus as 'whereases':

  The grammar of a French judgment will cause only momentary difficulty; but it is perhaps worth mentioning that the judgment is framed as a single sentence, of which the subject and the verb occur at the very beginning and the very end respectively, and are divided by a number of ‘whereases’ (attendu, or in the lower courts considérant); these ‘whereases’, of course, contain the motifs. The actual decision will be found at the very end in the dispositif which starts with the words: ‘Par ces motifs. . .’